Thursday, November 26, 2009 TOKYO: For as long as anyone can remember, the Tokyo International Robot Exhibition has been a showcase for Japan at its wackiest: stern industrial machines lurked backstage as waltzing, noodle-making or ping-pong-playing humanoids stole the limelight. But in recessionary 2009, with Japanese industry writhing in pain, the national robot obsession has turned serious. For the first time, the show explained how the machines really are going to take over. A new mood was in the air: the downturn, said one Tsukuba University engineer, had honed Japanese robotics research and forced it to be more practical. Companies and universities that were once given unlimited budgets to push the boundaries of robotics were now being told to come up with something usable and commercial and fast. Toyota’s recent decision to pull out of Formula 1 was a hot topic of discussion: would its next cost-cutting move be to close the robotics division or would it still throw millions into perfecting a trumpet-playing automaton? The fun stuff, accordingly, was downplayed while potential applications were pushed to the front. That gave many of the companies a chance to show that, quietly but steadily, the technology has been improving by leaps and bounds. Getting a cute humanoid robot such as Honda’s Asimo to go from walking to running took decades of effort, said one Tokyo University engineer, but the work of making a machine into a better pizza-maker than a human moved much faster. Japanese robots are being built with open software codes, to encourage outside programmers to come up with ideas to make them even more useful. It is all working rather too well.
Thursday, November 26, 2009 TOKYO: For as long as anyone can remember, the Tokyo International Robot Exhibition has been a showcase for Japan at its wackiest: stern industrial machines lurked backstage as waltzing, noodle-making or ping-pong-playing humanoids stole the limelight. But in recessionary 2009, with Japanese industry writhing in pain, the national robot obsession has turned serious. For the first time, the show explained how the machines really are going to take over. A new mood was in the air: the downturn, said one Tsukuba University engineer, had honed Japanese robotics research and forced it to be more practical. Companies and universities that were once given unlimited budgets to push the boundaries of robotics were now being told to come up with something usable and commercial and fast. Toyota’s recent decision to pull out of Formula 1 was a hot topic of discussion: would its next cost-cutting move be to close the robotics division or would it still throw millions into perfecting a trumpet-playing automaton? The fun stuff, accordingly, was downplayed while potential applications were pushed to the front. That gave many of the companies a chance to show that, quietly but steadily, the technology has been improving by leaps and bounds. Getting a cute humanoid robot such as Honda’s Asimo to go from walking to running took decades of effort, said one Tokyo University engineer, but the work of making a machine into a better pizza-maker than a human moved much faster. Japanese robots are being built with open software codes, to encourage outside programmers to come up with ideas to make them even more useful. It is all working rather too well.
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